Category Archives: Salads, Sides, Snacks & Soups

Happy Monday! Today we’d like to share with you a hearty and healthy soup that serves as a main course. It’s a great meal for Meatless Monday!

This black bean soup comes together so quickly and easily. Sure, you have to fry up the tortillas, but you can always skip that step and use store-bought tortilla chips, especially if you don’t have a package of corn tortillas in your fridge that you can’t remember when it was purchased…

What do you do with all the leftover veggies lying around your fridge? Well, we know one option is to make a pot pie out of them. Or you can always roast them. But it’s cold out, so soup is another option. If you also have some dried beans (or a can) lying around, you can have a healthful lunch or a wonderful side with dinner (or add a crostini or garlic bread to dip into the soup and voila – dinner!). Add your favorite mini pasta and you’ll get a thicker and more hearty soupy meal. Continue reading …

I wanted to make tomato soup to accompany the grilled cheese I planned to make with my amazing pita bread! I decided to balance out all of the work it took to make the pita (although it really wasn’t hard!) with this simple recipe I found on the Food Network site, much easier than the version Jessica made, but also delicious. There were so many recipes to choose from, but this one looked easy and had great reviews.

We needed something green for this Meatless Monday dinner, too; I guess that’s where the pickle and avocado come in.

Lachmagine is a classic mazza, a “small bite” Syrian Jews often eat before dinner. It’s kind of like a mini pizza, but instead of sauce and cheese we put tamarind and meat on it. It’s a staple in many homes on Shabbat and holidays.

Tomato soup is one of those amazing winter recipes. You can have it with noodles and cheese to make it a one-pot meal on a snowy evening. And it just improves in the fridge, so you can take leftovers for lunch! I had been thinking about making tomato soup with a can of tomatoes I had in my pantry when I watched Alex’s Day off. She combined fresh and canned tomatoes for an even more intense tomato flavor. Sure, her tomatoes looked better than the pinkish ones that I found in the supermarket, but after charring them on the stove and cooking them in wine, they really add some amazing flavor.

I had a jar of olives sitting in my fridge, waiting to be eaten. Sure, we could have eaten them plain, but we also had about 1/2 of a baguette waiting to get stale, so I thought it best to eat them together, before it was too late! I’m pretty sure this happens to everyone, doesn’t it? Naturally, I made an olive spread to spread on the toasted bread, which my genius husband suggested topping with cream cheese before adding the tapenade. Genius! So, you should do this too when you find yourselves in a similar situation and in need of a perfect midnight snack. Or appetizer. Or lazy dinner.

So you know when you walk by those Nuts 4 Nuts carts in Manhattan and they smell so amazingly good that you finally cave in and buy them, only to realized that you wasted two dollars on something that smells 1000 times better than it tastes? Why do they not taste like they smell? I decided to take matters into my own hands. These subtly spiced candied cashews made my apartment smell amazing and they made my taste buds happy. Take that, nuts that you buy from a cart on the street (when you put it that way, I’m not so surprised…)!

I had all of these leftover cashews from when I made cashew chicken. I also wanted something to munch on. These candied cashews come together so quickly and easily (maybe 15 minutes), as long as you have cashews around, you’re good to go. Or else try them with other nuts. They’re very similar to the peanuts that Jessica made, but I played around with the spices and the sugars.

Candied Cashews

Ingredients:

2 cups raw unsalted cashews

1 cup brown sugar

1 cup water

1/2 tablespoon cinnamon

1/2 teaspoon freshly ground nutmeg

1 teaspoon salt

Directions:

Line a baking sheet with parchment paper.

Mix the spices together.

In a large skillet over high heat, mix the nuts, sugar and water. Stir frequently and bring to a boil. Continue stirring; the liquid should evaporate and turn into a syrupy consistency. This should take about 10 minutes.

Sprinkle the spices over the nuts and stir vigorously, letting the water completely evaporate, for about 4 minutes.

Turn off the heat and continue stirring until the nuts are coated in the crystallized sugar.

When I read that we would be getting turnips and beets from our final farmshare pickup, I said Awesome, I can pickle the turnips, if only we had some cauliflower… And that Monday, when I went to pick up the vegetables, surprise! We also got to take home a head of cauliflower. So now I had to make these pickles!

Ades soup is a classic Syrian dish. These red lentils turn yellow when boiled, and often confuses people who’ve never seen the soup before (“Wait, I thought you said RED lentil soup. This is yellow!”). It’s an easy and comforting dish you can make on a chilly winter evening and that you can enjoy for lunch the next day. The first time I made this dish was in college, and my roommates were not to keen on tasting it (I don’t know why!). Lucky me! I ate a lot of soup that week.

It’s flavored with coriander and cilantro, one of my favorite flavors. If you don’t like cilantro, just use parsley instead. Or leave it out, this soup has enough flavor on its own. To add some extra flavor, use vegetable or chicken stock in place of the water.

Ades Soup, or Syrian Red Lentil Soup, adapted from here and some family traditions:

Ingredients:

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 tablespoon ground coriander

1 red onion

4 cloves garlic

1 cup split red lentils, rinsed

6 cups water

1/4 cup flour

1/4 cup freshly squeezed lemon juice

Kosher salt, to taste

1/4 cup chopped cilantro

1 1/2 teaspoons ground cumin

Pinch of cayenne pepper

Directions:

1. Heat a large saucepan over medium heat and add oil.

2. When the oil is hot, add the coriander and let cook for about one minute.

3. Then, add onions and garlic. Add some kosher salt. Stir and cook for about 10 minutes, until onions soften.

4. Add the lentils to the pot. Mix and coat them with oil.

5. Add 5 cups of water and bring the mixture to a boil. Lower the heat and simmer for 5 minutes.

6. Meanwhile, mix flour with the remaining cup of water to make a paste. Add to the lentils.

7. Stir in the lemon juice and some more salt. Continue stirring over high heat until the mixture boils. Then, cover and cook another 15 minutes.

8. Add the cumin and cayenne. Mix well. Taste for salt and add more if needed.

9. Then add the cilantro. Serve with some lemon wedges and more chopped cilantro on top, if desired.

Here’s something you should definitely put on your Shabbat menu for tonight: Keskesoon is not a complicated dish. In fact, it’s really just a pasta dish with chick peas in it. But no one makes it better than Grandma Sally, which is why we invited her to our kitchen JUST to make her specialty.

As you will see, the ingredient list isn’t so extensive. You probably have everything on hand, except maybe the teeny pasta, which you will find in most supermarket pasta aisles. Never seen it before? You probably just glanced over it because you prefer little stars in your soup than these crazy peppercorn shaped pastas. These are much better. The secret to this dish is toasting the pasta before adding the water. It adds a nutty flavor that you don’t ever associate with pasta, but just works. It also makes some of the kernels browner than others, which makes it prettier on the plate, of course.

Keskesoon was always a Friday night and holiday staple in my Grandma’s house. We ate in in our chicken soup instead of rice. We put sauce and meatballs (and eggy-surprise!) over it. We used it as a base for our Hamud, peas and kibbe, and kibbe mushroom. Basically, you won’t run out of ways to eat this stuff. Some people even enjoy it plain, and why not?

My family really only eats this with meat meals. We always make it pareve, and with oil. When I consulted Deal Delights (the red one) for the recipe, I was surprised to find how different their recipe is from ours! Theirs calls for about 6 tablespoons of butter, and baking it in a dish with grated cheese on top – keskesoon, mac and cheese style, sounds awesome. They also spell it keskasoon. I guess since it’s not an English word there is no one proper way to spell it. One day I will have to try that version, but for now I’m sticking to our traditional way of eating and spelling. How does your family make keskesoon?